1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to devices, systems, and processes useful for distributing data and/or content, and more specifically to controlling how a user of that data and/or content uses it and can compensate the author or owner.
2. Brief Description of the Related Art
Music sharing has become a very popular activity for many people, and has occasioned the rapid creation and development of formats, devices, and systems that facilitate it. A number of digital music formats, including MP3 and wave formats, have spawned whole industries, and even new vernacular language, to make the use and distribution of digitally encoded music easier, faster, and commercially acceptable. The distribution of such content has been greatly advanced through the use of public networks, e.g., the internet and WWW.
There have been a number of problems that have arisen with the rise of the distribution of digital content, including music, in these new formats and through the internet. Many of the digital formats that are used are not copy-protected, thus opening up the possibility that a single digital copy of a song or set of songs could be distributed without any compensation to the copyright holder. It has been the case that such copying and distribution of digitized copyrighted material has caused economic harm to persons and businesses to whom royalties would have been due for the copies which were distributed in this manner.
Another difficulty in the use of some of these digital formats for music is that a person who wants to preview a song or set of songs typically must pay for a complete copy of the title or titles that they are interested in, effectively defeating the whole notion of previewing them. Instead, the person has, at that time, paid for the title(s) without having made an informed purchasing decision by having first heard the music. Thus, the potential ‘buyer’ must either pay without having previewed the title(s), or not receive a copy of the title to listen to. Still other prior systems permit the potential buyer only a partial exposure to the content, e.g., a low-fidelity and/or shortened version of a song, low-resolution copy of an image, etc.
Systems have been proposed to address some of the problems associated with the distribution of digitally encoded content, such as music, but are not completely satisfactory for some purposes. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,460,076, published International applications WO 01/29732 A2 and WO 01/86842 A2, and published U.S. application Ser. No. US 2002/0062357 A1 all describe various systems and processes of this variety. Subscription services have also been proposed, but are not cost-effective to infrequent users, as they are typically structured so that the user pays a flat fee for access to whole databases of content. The prior art does not, however, provide an acceptable combination of content delivery, protection of encoded content, value to the user, and remuneration to the content source. Indeed, commercial ventures have been launched, such as burnitnow.com, that attempt to address these problems, but fall short of a solution acceptable to both users and content providers.
There therefore remains a need to allow the sharing and distribution of music, whether through the internet or not, while enabling successful content providers, e.g. musicians and labels, to obtain revenue from successful content.